RIO DE JANEIRO -- Team USA will face its old friends from Argentina on Wednesday in the mens basketball quarterfinals at the Rio Olympics.Argentinas loss Monday night in its Group B finale against Spain, coupled with Croatias subsequent rout of Lithuania, dropped the Manu Ginobili-led Argentines to fourth place in the group -- but one spot ahead of rival Brazil, which was eliminated.The USA-Argentina winner will face the Spain-France winner in Fridays semifinals. On the other side of the bracket, Australia meets Lithuania in one quarterfinal and Group B winner Croatia takes on bitter rival Serbia in the other.With Ginobili, Luis Scola, Andres Nocioni and Carlos Delfino, Argentina stunned a U.S. team that featured a 20-year-old named Carmelo Anthony in the semifinals of the 2004 Olympic tournament in Athens. That loss sparked an overhaul of USA Basketball, which led to the 2005 appointment of Dukes Mike Krzyzewski as coach under USAB chairman Jerry Colangelo.The Americans have since won 21 consecutive games in the Olympics and two successive gold medals under Krzyzewski. But Team USA, with Anthony as its most experienced player, has struggled by its own lofty standards in Rio, winning its previous three games against Australia, Serbia and France by a mere 16 points combined.Well be ready for these last three [games], Im telling you right now, Team USA guard Klay Thompson told ESPNs SportsCenter on Sunday after scoring 30 points in the Americans 100-97 victory over France.Thompson insisted that a late flurry by the French, after the Americans had seized a 100-90 lead, made the final margin look worse than it was.As for criticism his team has received for not coming together as quickly as anticipated compared to the cohesion that underdog opponents such as Australia and Serbia have shown, Krzyzewski told SportsCenter of his players: Well, I do think they trust each other. Theyre just not accustomed to playing with one another. When youre together for one month, its not as instinctive.But dont confuse it with not getting along, ?pulling for each other, things like that. Its just not as instinctive as it would be for an international team thats played together for years. Thats always something that we have to fight in putting a team together for these international competitions. But were getting there.Team USA throttled Argentina by 37 points last month when the teams met in a July 18 exhibition in Las Vegas. But the Americans road to the gold-medal game will force them to see off the most seasoned competition they could have drawn just for the chance to play for the championship in Krzyzewskis farewell tournament.Spain opposed the United States in each of the past two gold-medal games, losing by scores of 118-107 and 107-100. This incarnation of Spain, however, will be without Memphis Grizzlies center Marc Gasol, who is not playing alongside brother Pau Gasol at these Olympics as he continues his recovery from the foot surgery that limited him to 52 games last season.We know that the quarterfinals is the beginning of another tournament, France coach Vincent Collet said. When you reach this goal, [then] the real tournament starts.Said Team USAs Thompson: Everyone we see now is going to be explosive. Were happy to be 5-0, and we control our own destiny. We just have to trust ourselves on both sides of the ball, and if we do that and play hard, I dont think well lose. Ultra Boost Schweiz . Nathan MacKinnon, Jamie McGinn and Jan Hejda also scored for the Avalanche, who won despite being outshot 38-23. MacKinnons goal, also on the power play, came with just over a minute remaining. Ultra Boost Kaufen Schweiz . Each of Houstons starters scored in double figures as the Rockets improved to 2-0 against the Spurs this season, with both victories coming on the road. They also moved within 3 1/2 games of San Antonio (22-7) for the lead the Southwest Division. http://www.nmdschweizkaufen.ch/lite-racer-outlet.html . -- Most satisfying to Russ Smith about No. Nmd r2 Herren Schweiz . Oyama had six birdies and two bogeys at Kintetsu Kashikojima in the event also sanctioned by the Japan LPGA Tour. "I have been having this neck ache thats been affecting my golf recently," Oyama said. Adidas Nmd Outlet . PAUL, Minn. The arrival of the India squad in Florida this weekend brought in huge throng of supporters hoping to spur a new age for neutral-venue cricket possibilities in the USA. But their presence also drew attention from an unlikely source, with a series of Major League Baseball data miners camping out in Lauderhill for the weekend to see how to bring their analytics to another sport.Eleven members of MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), who help curate data for the online services known as MLB Statcast and MLB At Bat, set up a trailer at the Central Broward Regional Park to collect as much player and ball-tracking data as possible in an effort to bring their new-age stats approach to cricket from baseball.Were doing some research on how can we apply our Statcast data acquisition technologies to other sports, i.e. cricket, because baseball and cricket are very similar to each other, says Kevin Prince, a broadcast analyst with MLBAM who is originally from Kent, England, but has been working in the USA for more than 30 years. Were here to gather all the player-tracking and ball-tracking data, hopefully to provide a system that can provide the Statcast type of analysis that weve perfected for baseball, and hopefully provide that for cricket.As part of their technical set-up at the stadium in Lauderhill, the crew set up six cameras mounted to the floodlight towers on the west side of the ground, as well as a radar above the sightscreen on the north side. The cameras track player movement while the radar tracks ball movement. The crew visited Lauderhill last month for the Caribbean Premier League and their interest was sufficiently piqued for them to make a return for the India-West Indies T20s to see what they could apply from baseball principles.Its the fourth-generation stats, more performance-driven on the field, says Per Von Rosen, a technical manager with Statcast, originally from Stockholm, Sweden, who came to the USA last year but has previously done cricket analysis in England. So, how hard did you pitch, how hard did you hit, exit velocity of the ball coming off the bat. In fielding, the route efficiency taken to catch the ball.We know where a fielder was when the play started, we know where he caught the ball, and therefore we can know which path he took. Was it a straight line, did he deviate from that straight path, and how fast did he react to the ball off the bat - all of these things. Its basically putting together his athletic capabilities. Some guys always happen to be in the right place to make the catch, and now were putting numbers on that.One of the most popular data points in terms of fan traffic for Statcast online is exit velocity. Giancarlo Stanton of the Miami Marlins, the 2016 All-Star Game home-run derby champion, has nine of the 15 highest exit velocity measurements of the season, with a highest of 123.9mph speed of the ball coming off the bat. However, six of the nine connections only went for singles and none for home runs.The hardest you can hit a ball has to be a trajectory thats a little more flat, says Rob Engel, a senior software engineer with MLBAM. Any time you hit a home run, you have to put a little more launch angle on the ball, and youre not actually hitting it as square as you would hit a line drive. So the farthest home runs are technically hit a little softer than a hard line drive straight back to the pitcher, because the bat maintains contact with the ball longer, so you hit it harder.In cricket, the use of these metrics could demonstrate that players who hit sixes arent necessarily swinging or connecting harder, especially compared to a drive straight back down the pitch or a cut straight to point. Little nuggets like this are what Engel says draw fans in. Big numbers are sexy. Where the Statcast appearss to be having a significant impact in terms of media scrutiny for players is in terms of the fielding aspects, which have long been neglected.dddddddddddd. Engel, who is originally from San Francisco, was at his first ever cricket match on Saturday, but says he has immediately identified areas where cricket data could be improved for fielders based on what he has done with baseball.Things are really registering well with fans, as well as smaller things like arm strength, route efficiency and distance covered, theyre easy to comprehend, says Engel. Arm strength measures the speed of the ball out of the arm from an outfield throw, route efficiency tracks the distance and time it takes to field a ball from the moment it leaves the bat and is cross-analysed against raw distance covered.Another area is base-running speed, including acceleration time it takes to reach top speed as well as top overall speed from home to first, first to third base and so on. But even subtler things are tracked, such as how big a lead a base runner gets off the base before attempting to steal. They are learning the slim margins that allow for a slower runner to gain a bigger advantage and get to the next base quicker than a runner with a higher speed rating.For cricket, it can be taken to measure fastest runners between the wickets and the impact of acceleration and deceleration while converting one run into two or two into three. Not only are the measures of interest to fans, but teams are able to utilise them for scouting purposes to gauge whose arm they cant or can take on for a second run from the boundary.Theres an outfielder for the Yankees who threw a ball 105mph with a crow hop earlier this year - Aaron Hicks, Engel says. That sparked a Twitter controversy - how can an outfielder throw harder than Aroldis Chapman? But if you look at the physics of the throw, with a running start and a crow hop, it makes sense you can throw the ball harder than from a [pitchers] mound without a running start. So those things are really registering well with fans, as well as smaller things like route efficiency and distance covered, theyre easy to comprehend.Traditional fielding stats only credit you negatively, and its basically who screwed up the least rather than who gave us the best performance. So now we have a forward-thinking model on what fielders can give us the most out of their physicality as opposed to who screws up the least.Prince says they are currently in discussions with the ECB, IPL teams, and Big Bash franchises. who are all keen to gain access to the Statcast capabilities. Baseball has the leading digital asset creation and development tools out there, says Prince. The whole Statcast aspect has been recognised by all the other sports as being a groundbreaking structure, so theres a lot of people interested in these aspects of the game. A lot of people are interested in seeing how were going to go here.Von Rosen says in his time watching cricket in England, he noticed how fielders were underappreciated, with only catches and run-outs marked in traditional stats. The Statcast technology can track fielders at point, for example, who may be cutting off singles with their speed to the ball off the bat, but have not got the recognition they deserve. In that way, MLBAMs data could transform how cricket analyses player performance.You go online and you start reading your cricket news or baseball news, what we want to do is put material on there that youll never stop looking for news, says Von Rosen. Youll be watching video after video, play after play with all of this information you can see, so you never really want to stop. ' ' '